It took me four dinners at Atoma before I could stand to not order the rosette cookie. Which is understandable. After all, we’re talking about a crepe-thin flower of fried batter that hides soft white farmer cheese and Walla Walla onion jam inside its crisp petals. It’s vintage Scandinavia meets U-S-A country fair food, wrought in a Northwest kitchen that’s no stranger to tweezers. 

Instead, that night, I began dinner with the panisse, a hefty chickpea fritter with an interior soft as custard despite its golden shell. On top, a whisper of leek marmalade and a shouting amount of comte cheese custard, piped to resemble a savory eclair. I didn’t miss that cookie one bit. 

Chef Johnny Courtney would rather switch things up, but diners’ love for the rosette keeps it locked into first position on Atoma’s menu. “People get them for starters and desserts,” he says. “And then they get them to go.”  

Sure, a high-end cookie—that’s also fried and filled with cheese—feels like a hard act to surpass. But every corner of the menu produces similar thrills, from steak tartare shingled with housemade vinegar potato chips to dungeness with crab fat caramel on idyllic pain de mie toast. Food this exacting might feel intimidating if it weren’t served in a cozy converted house, alongside a drink menu divided into sections with names like “short kings” (a.k.a. cocktails served in rocks glasses) and “STEM fields” (that would be anything in a stemmed coupe).  

Last November, Johnny and Sarah Courtney opened Atoma in the compact former Craftsman where Tilth pioneered organic dining and won a James Beard Award. Johnny’s culinary resume is full of cred, but his four years in the Canlis kitchen are an especially shiny accolade for Seattle diners. Canlis plus Tilth equals a lot of big-name expectations to heap on a new restaurant powered by an SBA loan and some DIY general contracting.  

All these months later, though, diners don’t really bring up those other restaurants. Instead, they might mention the dim sum–inspired radish cake or the lion’s mane mushroom katsu. Maybe the selection of miniature cocktails, two-ounce batched concoctions—ideal for when you’re debating whether to have one more round. Definitely that rosette. 

Atoma burst onto Seattle’s challenge-addled restaurant landscape with fine dining ambitions and the heart of a small, bootstrapped place. Like a fried, cheese-filled cookie, it offers the best of both worlds. For striking this elusive balance, for Johnny Courtney’s precision menu, for delivering finesse but also housemade Cheez-Its at the bar—and, yes, for that rosette cookie—Atoma is Seattle Met’s restaurant of the year. 

Courtney’s biggest contribution to our dining culture might be establishing this category of robust finger food. The menu begins with a few decadent little compositions; servers urge you to consider each order an individual serving. This notion feels weird in a shared-plate world. Plus splitting a $7 rosette or $8 panisse among several people certainly makes for a friendlier bill. But Lady and the Tramping something so delicate undermines the luxurious delight of the experience. 

Luxurious delight is a scarce commodity in Seattle restaurants right now. There are plenty of places where you can ring up a sizable check. But establishments big and small are reckoning with decades of off-kilter math. Keeping your doors open in this city—while also paying staff a living wage, serving delicious food, and keeping prices at a level where regular humans can afford to go out to eat—is a diabolical game of fiscal Jenga. Hiring remains hard. To work in the restaurant business is to work your ass off. But some of the same measures that help a place stay solvent, like balancing costs with counter service or simplifying the menu, can disappoint customers. These moves become a trip wire as much as a lifeline.  

Nobody is calling this menu simple; Courtney’s kitchen makes its own XO sauce out of dried geoduck trim. Details beyond the plate get the same level of scrutiny: glassware, soundtrack, spacing of tables, sound-absorbing panels hidden in plain sight. Atoma’s food is impressive. The high-end feel it accomplishes in an old house (on a limited budget, in this difficult climate), perhaps even more so. 

Describing Atoma’s food as hyperseasonal is both utterly correct and a criminal underselling of what Courtney’s team pulls off in a kitchen barely larger than a California king mattress. Beyond those single-serve canapes, the menu splits between entrees and cunning vegetable creations; I’m still thinking about that kohlrabi with dungeness crab in almond milk. Main dishes like sockeye salmon and pork collar sound familiar but feel as complete and exciting as the smaller bites—an underrated quality in restaurants.  

Before Canlis, Courtney cooked in high-end spots in Denver and Melbourne. He and Sarah lived in Todos Santos, on the Baja coast, and his upbringing included New Mexico and the American South. Those very different places offered ideas and influences that he collects on Atoma’s menu. His travels also impressed upon him that the Northwest is an unreal playground when it comes to produce. His kitchen does right by this largesse. The produce that dresses the pork collar, the piripiri carrots, a transcendent salad of grilled cucumbers: The things this team does with produce take every dish up a notch or three. 

Atoma’s fun side really comes out at the tiny bar tucked in the back, a mere four seats and also the only place where you can score a ramekin of housemade Cheez-Its as a bar snack. This is the domain of bar director Dillon Raaz, who dreamed up the two-ounce cocktail idea with Johnny and Sarah Courtney over drinks one night. The cocktails at Atoma were superb from the start, though over the past year Raaz (with help from his colleague John Lundahl) has really upped his game when it comes to cheeky, joke-filled drink names. It’s hard to take things too seriously when ordering a Male Pattern Garabalding off the “High Ball Is Life” section of the menu.  

Sure, there are quibbles. Desserts still feel like a work in progress. Some service hasn’t lived up to the rest of the experience. Then there was the gent who served my party of five friends one evening (warning: the following anecdote is not at all family friendly).

Our meal was so good, the shared cod entree disappeared before it could make its way around the entire table (we ordered another). The girl talk got, I admit, a little R rated. Maybe NC-17 after that second bottle of wine arrived? Our server remained studiously neutral and professional all evening, despite overhearing some NSFW snippets. When the friend leading the charge on this adult subject matter ordered a final beer, she remarked to him, “I really appreciate that you guys serve beer in a chilled glass.” 

“Thank you,” he replied with the smoothest of poker faces. “You could say, we’re anal about it.” Reader, I’ll let you fill in the blanks, but talk about meeting your guests where they are, while maintaining the decorum expected at a place that serves $40 entrees. Our table whooped like audience members on a mid-’90s daytime talk show. Moments like this are probably why the Courtneys space the tables a little farther apart than they might. 

Johnny Courtney still laments that the ambitions of his regular menu (and the size of his kitchen) ultimately foiled his plans to add a tasting menu. An Atoma tasting option would be cool indeed. But there’s so much going on in this restaurant, you don’t even miss it. Not when you’re mellowed by a few miniature cocktails, stuffed from a menu flexible enough to deliver traditional starters and entrees, or just a flurry of snacks. Not when you’re debating whether to order a second rosette and call it dessert. And not when you’re having this much fun.